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Class Topics & Required Activities

2006
 

• You will honing your observational skills and understanding of ecological relationships. You will read a small book, Seeing Nature,¹ written by a US Park Naturalist and educator, Paul Krafel. You will find this interesting, whether you are an urbanite who has never been beyond a manicured park or an experienced ecologist. You also will have case studies in another book, Gardeners of Eden,¹ by Dan Daggett. You will get supplemental information on some of these studies from our personal experiences.
   

• You will have an "online textbook" prepared for you as a participant in the class. It was an idea of a former student in the class who has helped formulate the ideas and it will unfold as the semester progresses. You will use it many times.
   

• You will create a personal holistic goal to use as a basis of evaluating your choices of how you spend your "heartbeats" to maximize simultaneously your quality of life, your activities, and your future resource base. This will be part of your reading in the online textbook, and will also be part of your developing a strong and functional team for your class project.
   

• You will learn to monitor your own learning process and achievements, and document them in a Learning Record, which will be the basis for your course grade, and for possible future recommendations written on your behalf. This is an evaluation process known in educator circles as authentic evaluation (in contrast to "symbolic" evaluation from performance on exams). In the process you will review each other's LR. The reviews will both help you learn better from what you learn as an reviewer, and from the comments and ideas given to you by the classmates who review your LR.
   

• You will work in a team to complete a series of projects. The common thread of all projects is managing natural resources.

  1. To do this, you must be able to observe and relate observations so a reasonable history of the ecosystem is possible. This requires that you read and describe the relevance of class assignments to each of the projects.

  2. Then, you work together to share observations and interpretations, and revise your original historical interpretation.

  3. From your inferred history, you determine the ecological system dynamics.

  4. You imagine how different changes in the external features (such as human effects) will change these system dynamics.

  5. You will discuss possible futures, such as conserving the existing system, modifying it into a new ecological system dynamic (ecological restoration), or to make the ecosystem more compatible to encourage healthy dynamics of an endangered species (conservation), or to allow a more profitable and sustainable business or society to develop. In this discussion you relate what you have learned from class assignments and your team activities and discussions.

  6. You will write a report of your study, analyzing and comparing your analysis with your team mates' analysis. You will record in your analysis a summary of what you have learned (not what you have done physically). Then you will record your learning experiences into your LR.

  7. During and after completion of each of the projects you will record in your LR your observations of what you are learning, and how you know you are learning ("dimensions of learning"). (Learning is expected to relate -- at a minimum -- to your assignments, your field work and your team discussions.

  8. After completing your project, you will participate in a full class "Moderation" of your LR at mid semester and end of the class.

  9. Maintaining your LR is the only way you will be graded, and when finished (at least a week before the end of class) you will repeat the process followed in the Moderation as part of your final learning Analysis and summarize your reasons for the grade you think best describes your success in the class, using the same criteria as in the midsemester Moderation.
      

• You will be receiving frequent on your learning progress by the instructors and fellow students in the class. The "perfect class" will have the grade report of all A's. There is no "curve" and the entire focus is to help you learn and enjoy the process. Your personal commitment is crucial to your ability to learn, record it in your LR, and enjoy the process.

¹ I will get these for you at a discounted price from the authors.